Clause 24 - Attendance for fingerprinting
Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Bill
11:15 am
John Leech (Manchester, Withington, Liberal Democrat)
I will not go over the points made by the hon. Lady, but I should like to touch on a couple of issues specifically in relation to the period of notice that people will be given for fingerprint tests. I believe that the Government are making a large mistake by separating refugees from all other categories and suggesting that they can be called for fingerprinting within a three-day period. I shall give one brief personal example. It relates not to immigration but to planning and a letter that I once sent to my local council. I sent the letter well before the deadline for objections to a planning application, but it arrived 13 days after I had sent it, at which point the letter was out of time and could not be considered as a legitimate objection to the application.
I believe that people who are sent letters containing deadlines and days and times for fingerprinting will often receive them after that time. As a result, the system will be slowed down rather than speeded up. Many appointments will be missed and will have to be reissued, causing an administrative nightmare, whereas if we kept the existing regulations, whereby people are given seven days’ notice, we could pretty much guarantee that people would receive the notification in time and would be able to attend at some time—not at a specific time in the day, but at some point during a particular day. What clause 24 proposes—we tabled an amendment suggesting that the clause be deleted—will revert to the status quo and the powers in place under the 1999 Act. Three days’ notice is completely unworkable and I ask the Minister to think again.